Voxeo Talks

One of the challenges we have in giving away voice application development services is that for the most part we don’t really know what exactly people do with our platform! If they become a commercial hosted customer, we obviously learn about their application but if it’s done with our premise Prophecy platform, or even a free account on our Evolution portal, we don’t usually know what people are using us for unless they (or someone) tell us or it turns up in one of our searches.

So we were intrigued to learn via a blog post back in March that a developer has launched the “Turnout Machine” using Ruby on Rails and our platform. The blog post has more details, but here’s the piece on the application screen:

• Dare your friends to vote and see if they chicken out.
• We’ll send your friends a txt or give them a phone call on election day reminding them of their promise to vote.

The developer indicates that this is his experiment in looking at “how peer-to-peer connections might be leveraged to create action”. He goes on to talk about the technical side:

The application was written using Ruby on Rails and is hosted on a Joyent Accelerator. The interesting bits from a technical perspective are the txt messaging and telephony support. To send out txt messages I am using Clickatell - an SMS aggregator and service provider. I had never interfaced with their service before, but it turns out there is a gem for Ruby that made it insanely simple. To send out phone calls I had considered using Asterisk, but instead decided on using Voxeo’s hosted VoiceXML platform. This made it easy to get the service up and running quickly without having to think very much about telephony infrastructure. It will also let me do speech recognition if the need ever arises.

It’s great to see he’s using Ruby on Rails to interact with our platform and personally being very interested in all things political I do wish him all the best with his experiment. I do hope he’ll write up how it all worked out for him. (Of course, it sounds like our part (calling people with reminders) doesn’t kick in until the actual Election Day this coming November.) Again, the blog post has more details if you would like to learn more.

Do you have a cool application you have developed using our platform (hosted or premise)? If so, please do drop me a note and let me know. We’re looking to profile more applications here on this blog in the future.

P.S. We don’t know the developer of this application and as the blog post was unsigned we can only guess his name from the About page. If you do choose to actually participate in his Turnout Machine application, it is at your own risk. We just thought it was worth writing about as a cool use of our platform.

Technorati Tags:
ruby, rubyonrails, voxeo, voicexml, applications, politics

Today over on his Tech News Comments blog, Markus Göbel writes about how he uses an application on our Evolution site as a bridge from Skype to the phone network. People who call him on his Skype ID ring him on his desk phone or cell phone. It’s a great little demonstration of our transfer capabilities.

Markus also wonders what I think about this solution, especially given that I had written about Skype’s lack of interoperability on my Disruptive Telephony blog earlier this year. Well, first off, I’m delighted that Markus is experimenting with our platform and we do appreciate his kind words and writing about his experience. We’re glad to see he liked our Designer tool. We’ve put a lot of work into making that an easy and simple way to create voice applications without requiring you to learn all the intricacies of VoiceXML.

Second, he’s right that I’ve known about the “Skype-to-phone” capabilities of our platform and in fact I’ve used it for some of my own applications that I’ve developed on our platform. I just haven’t written about it on any of my blogs for two reasons:

1. The inbound Skype connection is there to allow our developers to build interesting applications for Skype; and
2. The connection is only one-way and doesn’t provide the full interoperability that I was writing about.

Let me hit each of these points separately. First, one of the coolest things to me about developing voice apps on our Evolution hosted platform is how incredibly easy it is have an app that can be reached from a range of different sources. As shown in the diagram to the right, any application you create can be reached through the following methods:

• Direct dial across the PSTN to a direct phone number (and applications can be assigned more than one number - for instance if you wanted numbers in different area codes)

• Dialing across the PSTN to an 800-number with a PIN code.
• Dialing across the PSTN to a non-800-number with a PIN code (which I didn’t show in the diagram)
• Inbound connections from SIP endpoints
• Inbound connections from Skype users
• Inbound connections from FWD (formerly FreeWorldDiallup)

Any of you reading this can try it out - just follow our Quick Start Guide. Skype is one of the ways that you can connect to whatever kind of application you create. As an example, here are the contact numbers for a small application of mine (a call-in comment line for my Blue Box podcast):

Pretty cool stuff, eh? Of the many things you can do with your application, you can of course make outbound transfers to the following services:

• Regular PSTN phone numbers (note that free Evolution developer accounts are restricted to making calls within the USA)

• SIP endpoints (including FWD users)

Note that outbound dialing is not enabled by default but if you email our support team we will issue you a “token” that you can use for outbound calling from your app.

What Markus did was create a very simple app that did an outbound transfer over SIP to a service which then rang his various phones. (As he is in Germany, the free Evolution accounts could presumably not call his number directly. Paid Evolution accounts, can, of course, call anywhere and pay the corresponding rates.) Calls can come in via Skype (or other means) and go out via SIP.

So if this is a “Skype-to-SIP” gateway, why aren’t we trumpeting it to the world? Simple… that’s not the purpose of the Skype connection. The inbound connection from Skype is to allow the 30,000+ developers on Evolution to build interesting apps that can work with Skype. Sure, you can obviously create a simple Skype to SIP “transfer” application like Markus did, but that’s not why Skype created the connection with us and if all we used it for was Skype-to-SIP transfers probably at some point Skype might clamp down on the usage. So while it certainly can be done, we ask people to understand the real reason we have the connection and to please not abuse that.

The second reason I personally haven’t written about this capability is because it’s not a full Skype interoperability solution. If you look on the right side of the diagram above, what’s missing? We can accept inbound connections from Skype (which is admittedly very cool for our apps), but we can’t do outbound connections to Skype users. If you look back at my article about Skype interop what I want is the ability to make SIP connections from within the Skype client itself. In contrast to Markus, who is now delighted that he can turn off his Skype client yet still receive calls to his ID, I want to use the Skype client and be able to call SIP endpoints.

In any event, I’m delighted that Markus is trying out our platform. He concludes his piece with:

Let’s see which other solutions I can develop with Voxeo. Their visual tool makes the design of VoiceXML fairly easy.

I, too, look forward to seeing what other solutions he’ll develop!

Technorati Tags:
skype, sip, voxeo, applications, xml, voicexml, fwd

When you hear mention of “Orlando, Florida”, what do you think of? Probably 99.9% of the time people think of certain giant theme parks located a bit south of the city. There is, however, a vibrant “downtown” Orlando in which our office is located. When I was down there last week (I normally work out of a home office in Vermont) I was testing out a new video camera and so I recorded some video showing the surrounding area. These were just test videos that I uploaded, but since they are now on YouTube, I thought I’d post them in case you are looking for a way to procrastinate and want to see what February looks like in Orlando:

By the way, this could be the view you see everyday if you came and worked for us - we are hiring! See our Jobs page for details.

I tweaked the camera’s settings a bit (including shifting from 16:9 to 4:3) and shot a night view from an adjacent tower:

I added a title slide, credits, etc. And yes, I probably could have edited out the part with me walking by the various columns. Remember… these were test videos, eh?

For the techies out there, the camera I am using is a JVC Everio GZ-MG330A. It’s a hard-drive camera that is small! Seems to work real well and imports nicely into my MacBook Pro. Editing, titles, etc. was done with Apple’s iMovie ‘08 which also did the conversion and upload to YouTube.

Anyway, we’ll have more videos coming out soon… in the meantime enjoy the view of Orlando.

P.S. Maybe next time I’m down there I’ll do a walking tour to show you what downtown Orlando looks like at ground level… roaming Segways and all.

Technorati Tags:
orlando, voxeo, video

We are very pleased to announce today that we were positioned in the “Visionaries Quadrant” of Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, 2008“. Given that we’ve only been selling our Prophecy premise product for two years, it’s a huge achievement in our view to be included along with other players who have been in the market much longer. As our CEO said in the release:

“We view our position in the Visionaries quadrant as further validation that Voxeo is enabling a fundamental shift in the way companies build and deploy voice applications,” said Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo. “Voxeo is only in its second year of premise IVR sales and we consider inclusion this early on in the product’s life cycle to be a significant milestone.”

Even though Prophecy has only been out in the market for two years, it’s based on the same rock-solid software we’ve used in our Evolution hosting environment for over 8 years. It’s an incredibly easy to use, extremely flexible voice platform based on open standards that don’t lock you in. Last year alone we had over 10,000 downloads of Prophecy and we know of its use in companies ranging from small innovative startups all the way up to large Fortune 500 companies. We’re delighted to be recognized by Gartner and look forward to continuing to enable even more companies to rapidly build and deploy voice applications!

P.S. If you aren’t familiar with Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” reports, they are widely read analyses by Gartner analysts that offer a view of a specific market and the participants in that market. To read more about our placement in the Magic Quadrant for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, you’ll need to view the report from Gartner (either through your existing access if you are a Gartner client or through purchasing the report).

Technorati Tags:
gartner, magic quadrant, ivr, voxeo

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new weblog: “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. In this weblog we will be giving you tips, tricks and tutorials to help you develop applications on our platforms. As you are probably aware, there is a huge amount of information available in the documentation and forums found on our Evolution developer site. What our goal is with this blog site is to point people to some of the nuggets of gold buried within the pages of Evolution. Members of our staff will highlight some of the great tips they have found and other information they think might help you build even better voice applications on our platform.

The blog is off to a great start already with Matt Henry’s initial post, “Certified Tech Tip: Using SISR-formatted grammars with Prophecy 8“, where he demonstrates what SISR-formatted grammars are all about. The post attracted some comments and Matt is already planning a follow-up post. Expect to see more along these lines from Matt and his team in the weeks ahead.

I also kicked off a series on voice mashups and Twitter today with a post “Voice Mashups with Twitter, part 1: Who will win the 2008 SuperBowl? (A mashup in CallXML.) where I show how you can create a voice application that sends its output out to the Twitter micro-blogging service. Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding more articles in that series.

If you are interested in developing voice applications, we do encourage you to check out the “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. There’s also an RSS feed if you would like to subscribe and stay up-to-date with our posts.

Technorati Tags:
applications, voxeo, developers, callxml, xml, voicexml, mashups, ccxml, apis

As we noted in our press release on Tuesday, we were delighted to be one of the recipients of Internet Telephony magazine’s “2007 Product of the Year” awards for our Prophecy product. As we state in the release:

Voxeo Prophecy 8 is the easy-to-install and openly downloadable platform for speech, VoIP and IVR applications. Before Prophecy, most telephony application platforms were complex “cast iron” systems that pre-dated the open era of the web. In stark contrast, Prophecy is built entirely on modern standards including VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP. Prophecy is as easy to install as a piece of consumer software, avoiding expensive on-site vendor installation. Prophecy is free for anyone to try, and is available at http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy.

We thank TMC.Net and look forward to seeing Rich Tehrani and many of the others in the TMC crew down at the Internet Telephony Expo in Miami later his month.

And please do check out Prophecy. You have basically all the incredible power of our hosted Evolution service - only in a version on your own premise!

Technorati Tags:
applications, prophecy, awards, rich tehrani, voxeo

We’ve been called many things over the years but being labeled a tool of the Israeli defense industry is certainly a new one on us! There is a thread making the rounds of various blog sites over the past few days that asserts that we are somehow owned by the Israeli defense industry and are somehow involved, potentially nefariously, in the Iowa caucuses. Most of this seems to stem from an article by writer Christopher Bollyn titled “ELRON - VOXEO: The Israeli Defense Firm That Tallies the Iowa Caucus” and crossposted on several other sites.

After we first saw these articles - and stopped laughing, we admittedly thought the assertions were so far out there that they wouldn’t be taken seriously. However, we have had a handful of email inquiries and have seen the text continue to be cross-posted to other blogs, so let’s just set the record straight for anyone searching on the topic…

First, Voxeo is a privately held, employee-owned company, and is not affiliated with, owned or controlled by any outside companies or interests. No Israeli defense firms, Russian mafia, aliens from Area 51 or anyone else like that.

Second, Voxeo specifically doesn’t program and run applications. The customers do that themselves and have complete control. Voxeo’s platform, if you will, is a slave to whatever the customer programs it to do. Any application programmer who understands the distributed XML model would know that Voxeo doesn’t “tally” a vote count for anyone. Neither our people nor our platform “tally” votes. A customer has to collect the data and interpret it themselves. Because Voxeo is one of the world’s leading VoiceXML hosting companies and is the only company with a 100% uptime guarantee, our application platform is the choice of a lot of organizations, political or otherwise. We’ve had over 55,000 applications built by our customers that do pretty much anything you can imagine being done with a phone. If you would like to check it out, visit our developer site at evolution.voxeo.com. You can set up your own account for free and see how easy it is to create applications (and how they remain under your control).

Finally, as to specific questions about who our customers are and what they do with our platform - like most businesses, we don’t disclose such information publicly. It’s up to our customers to disclose anything they do with us. Voxeo has experienced phenomenal growth over the last 5 years thanks to the opportunities brought to us by our customers. If we started talking about them and what they do without their permission we’d lose business quickly.

Feel free to leave us comments, though. As a company we’re very open and we’re glad to talk about anything other than the confidential interests and information of our customers.

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, elron

I am pleased to note on this final day of 2007 that we’ve recently added a new blog to the site. With “Behind The Blog“, our goal is to tell the story of what we had to do make this blog site work using WordPress MU - and to continue to write about what we do as we improve and enhance it in the time ahead. We’ll write about the plugins we add, the modifications we make and the challenges we deal with - and answer any questions raised by readers. More details - and information about why we are publishing this blog - can be found in the introductory post to the blog. If you are interested in creating a blog portal like blogs.voxeo.com, or are just interested in the technical details behind a site like this, feel free to join us as we explore the world of running a corporate blog portal using WordPress MU.

If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the direct feed for the blog or simply get new posts as part of the “all Voxeo blogs” feed. (Behind The Blog posts also appear in our new Twitter feed.)

Come along and join in our little adventure… we know there are bound to be challenges ahead!

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, wordpress mu, wpmu

We’re hiring! Check out the positions we have listed on Careerbuilder:

• Telecom Provisioning Administrator
• Technical Recruiter
• Customer Engineering and Support

As our job descriptions say:

Challenging work at an open-culture, profitable, pre-IPO, cutting-edge technology company in downtown Orlando.

• Are you the go-to person for your company’s most challenging issues?
• Do you love to “teach a man to fish” and take time to teach others how to use technology and solve its problems?
• Do you get frustrated by bureaucracy that keeps you from getting work done and making customers happy?
• If so we should talk. We’re building a world class company and need more people like you.

Company Background

Voxeo’s mission is to make it easy for anyone to create and deploy voice applications that can run on any home, mobile, office, or VoIP phone. Leading analyst firm Gartner says Voxeo is part of a select group of companies that “will have a business impact on the future of IT”. Voxeo is a profitable, pre-IPO, international, employee-owned, Internet software company. Our technology is at the cutting edge of Voice over IP (VoIP) and web 2.0 applications, standards, and mashups.

We want to revolutionize the telephone industry and are doing so every day. We run the world’s largest voice application developer community (over 30,000 members to date) and have hundreds of enterprise customers in fields including telecom, consumer services, healthcare, retail, government, and more.

At Voxeo we focus on building a team of incredible people and making our customers extremely happy. We work hard, but we believe in balance. We have numerous perks and benefits, including the best health insurance in Florida, incentive stock options, free snacks and drinks, an employee football team, catered lunch on Fridays, and poker and movie nights.

Voxeo employees work in our 100% cubicle-free open-environment office on the 20th floor of The Plaza – downtown Orlando’s newest office building. Our culture is just as open as our office. Voxeo employees are encouraged to ask for help from and offer help to anyone at any time. Our culture comes from our roots in Silicon Valley, where many of us helped start and build companies including Netscape, Yahoo, TellMe, and OpenWave.

Voxeo is built on a spirit of entrepreneurship. Many of our employees have previously founded other successful tech companies, and you will work directly with Voxeo’s co-founders on a daily basis.

Come join us!

P.S. You need to apply online through CareerBuilder.com so please do not leave any information here as comments.

We are currently looking for a kick ass telecom routing guru to lead up the management of our carriers and external routing systems such as SMS/800. If you or someone you know is someone who understands what SMS/800 is and knows the difference between a CAD and a CPR (or would like to learn) please take a look at the job listing below and drop us a line as we would love to hear from you.

Summary

Work for an open-culture, profitable, pre-IPO, cutting-edge technology company in downtown Orlando.Are you great at organizing things and pushing tasks and vendors to complete projects?Do you like building good relationships with vendors to make orders flow smoothly?Do you have experience with or enjoy accounting or telecommunications?Are you up for doing anything possible to make customers happy?Do you like solving problems and coming up with innovative ways to get things done?If so, we should talk. We’re building a world-class company and need more people like you.

About Voxeo

Voxeo’s mission is to make it easy for anyone to create and deploy voice applications that can run on any home, mobile, office, or VoIP phone. Leading analyst firm Gartner says Voxeo is part of a select group of companies that “will have a business impact on the future of IT”. Voxeo is a profitable, pre-IPO, international, employee-owned, Internet software company. Our technology is at the cutting edge of Voice over IP (VoIP) and web 2.0 applications, standards, and mashups.We want to revolutionize the telephone industry and are doing so every day. We run the world’s largest voice application developer community (over 30,000 members to date) and have hundreds of enterprise customers in fields including telecom, consumer services, healthcare, retail, government, and more.At Voxeo we focus on building a team of incredible people and making our customers extremely happy. We work hard, but we believe in balance. We have numerous perks and benefits, including the best health insurance in Florida, incentive stock options, free snacks and drinks, an employee football team, catered lunch on Fridays, and poker and movie nights.Voxeo employees work in our 100% cubicle-free open-environment office on the 20th floor of The Plaza – downtown Orlando’s newest office building. Our culture is just as open as our office. Voxeo employees are encouraged to ask for help from and offer help to anyone at any time. Our culture comes from our roots in Silicon Valley, where many of us helped start and build companies including Netscape, Yahoo, TellMe, and OpenWave.Voxeo is built on a spirit of entrepreneurship. Many of our employees have previously founded other successful tech companies, and you will work directly with Voxeo’s co-founders on a daily basis.

Responsibilities

• Create, manage, and track call routing plans through various carriers
• Create, manage, and track toll free call routing plans
• Place and track local and toll-free number orders through various carriers
• Place and track Local Number Portability orders through various carriers
• Think of and suggest ways to improve our number ordering process
• Do everything possible to make our customers happy with the number orders and setup
• Escalate and push issues with order delivery as necessary with the appropriate carrier
• Build relationships with appropriate carrier personnel to enhance productivity
• Help organize and maintain internal systems to track number inventory, orders, and status
• Help others on the Network Operations team as required

Requirements

• Excellent oral, written, email, and IM communication skills
• Great process of elimination and other problem solving skills
• Ability to work in a fast-paced office environment where multi-tasking is a must
• Ability to work full time (40+ hours/week)
• Experience with number ordering, Local Number Portability, or toll-free SMS / Resporg systems is highly desired

Benefits

• 100% company-paid health, vision, dental, and short-term disability insurance
• 100% cubicle-free, casual, open office environment with great views of Central Florida
• Incentive Stock Options and bonus plan
• Three minute walk to popular restaurants, bars, and a brand-new 12 screen movie theatre
• Challenging work and significant career growth at Orlando’s fastest growing tech company
• The opportunity to revolutionize how people use and create applications for any phone
• Free education and certification in highly desired technologies such as VoIP and VoiceXML
• Work directly with top experts in SIP VoIP technology and W3C web standards
• Free parking at our downtown Orlando office

Interested

Then please, contact us by emailing us at jobs@voxeo.comPlease include the position you’re applying for in the subject line of your email so we can find your application quickly. Thank you!You can learn more about Voxeo by checking out:

• Our corporate site
• Our developer site
• Our Flickr page

From our Employees

We asked all our employees what they thought we should mention in our job postings. Here’s some of what they had to say:“This company would be a hot commodity in Silicon Valley, but having an opportunity to work for a company like this in Orlando is rare and a huge thing for folks who don’t want to have to move out of state.”“I applied for a job here, but definitely got more than I bargained for, I found a place I can call home”“The item that really hooked me in my job interview is the health benefits. That’s a huge difference in Voxeo compared to other firms.”“One of the great points about working at Voxeo is the opportunity to work and learn directly with the company’s top engineers and executives”“Corporate culture is one of the perks that has kept us from being a “turn and burn” company … a large factor in our hiring process is a good culture fit, we would be remiss if we didn’t stress the fact that we are looking for cool people to work with”“I think you should say that Voxeo provides all of the tools that allow you to perform the challenging work, including telephone, laptop and the software you need to excel at any position”“To a lot of people in IT right now, the “MacBook Pro” has become the “hot” laptop to have and most people will never dream of getting one because they are stuck in a space where all they will ever see are Dell laptops of various vintages”“The great thing here is the opportunity to learn. The chance to increase your skill set exponentially in a cutting edge field and to feel truly needed and satisfied at the end of the day. Hard to quantify that sort of job experience but it is invaluable.”“I think a key point that we are trying to capture is that everyone at Voxeo works hard but we love what are working on. I think if there is some way to put down that the entire company loves what they are doing and you don’t have dead wood around is a nice thing. ““Speaking as a relative Voxeonoob, the office was a definite selling point in coming here. The view and top-floor-prestige aside, you can’t understate the importance of clean bathrooms”“We definitely have a fun and fabulous group of people.”“Everyone that works here has such a great personality and makes you feel right at home. The employees at Voxeo are accountable and extremely intellectual individuals, but they also know how to enjoy the day and laugh at the lighter side of things.”“I think the ‘can do’ culture should be in there, every employee is empowered to help the customer and to create a better solution”“The fact that the company (and some of the people) are Silicon Valley transplants has a certain sex appeal. We should consider mentioning that”“For me, the best part about working at Voxeo is our team family, and the culture of voxeo. We are intensely technical, and we work very hard, and we don’t take it all too seriously.”“I think Voxeo is a rarity for the Florida market. Opportunities to work with a successful, high-tech, industry-leading company are few and far between in this area”“One of the most attractive benefits for many people is our 100% company paid health insurance. That benefit alone can be the deal breaker for a potential employee. I would put that at the top of the benefits list”“I’d add that the office is located in the top floor of the Plaza, and perhaps market it up with “featuring spectacular views of I-4″ –replacing “I-4″ with whatever is truly spectacular”“One of the best things about being a Voxeon is that you have access to the highest level of management in an open and laid back setting. Often times people care more about who they work worth and enjoying coming to work each day then pay, benefits, etc.”“I like the ‘Teach a man to fish’ reference. I would find a way to emphasize that management is just as involved in the technology as the employees are.”“I think the all-hands and quarterly financial meetings are something that not all companies offer, and are seen as a benefit to many as they expose the insides of the company, show that Voxeo is very open about the state of the company, and allow the employees to participate in discussions that affect the company on the whole. ““The fact that you (the CEO) are asking us (the employees) for input on this job posting should somehow be conveyed in there as well. And it’s not just the job posting, you send out things like this all of the time, showing how much you value all of our input.”